Why have a blog if you're unknown?
The title of this blog is a question I've asked myself since I set this up. Do people really want to hear from somebody who is struggling to get into the industry, surely they'd rather hear from somebody who is already there and making a success of it. If that's the case please visit www.rickygervais.com. He seems to be doing ok for himself.
My main reason for starting this blog is because I was given a piece of advice by another unknown writer a while back who told me that "before you start writing you should perhaps type out some e-mails first to get the juices flowing, then start writing", I tried this for a while, but after a few days of e-mailing before writing I found that I was contacting people I didn't want to contact, and I was hearing back from them, some suggested we should go for a drink sometime. You can't then back track so I just didn't reply, if I bump into them I'll just blame e-mail problems. So, I decided to start this blog "to get the juices flowing".
When you're at the low level of being an aspiring writer you are bombarded with advice from lots of different people, people who are pretty much at the same level as you, just 10+ years older and scared that you might actually get somewhere. I'm advised to do things one way, yet I read the thoughts of another person who gives the opposite advice, who am I to believe? And why are all the un-successful people giving the advice? Probably because all the successful people are busy!
It's not only advice on the subject of writing that I tend to receive these days, as you get older you find that more and more people have an opinion on your life. I was advised the other day to snap out of the "dream world" of writing, this was advice I obviously ignored. Mainly due to the fact that it came from somebody who has barely lifted himself out of a certain chair in front of the TV for the past year (he's not even disabled).
Very few people understand the effort and thought that has to go into a script, therefore there will always be plenty of people trying to throw you off track and advising that you do other things, but one thing I've learnt is to keep my concentration and focus on my goal, if I do that, how can I fail? Well, I can fail, but I won't, mainly because I know that no matter how many rejections I get, I will never stop trying. That's just as important as being a good writer in my opinion, well probably a bit less important, but you get my point.